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2013/12/17

Film journal One+One have just published their latest issue, the second volume of their special edition focusing on trash, exploitation and cult cinema. I've written an article for volume two, 'White Walls and Empty Rooms: A Short History of the Fleapit'. This looks at the culture of underground film exhibition and also provides a brief account of the 'Fleapit' screening group I ran between 2003 and 2009.

Fleapit is the topic of Road Movies and this article works as something of a primer for that project.

For a film so concerned with space, it’s very hard to place
Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013). It’s geographically indistinct
and historically ambiguous. The attempt to define a critical position is
similarly fraught, mainly because the film offers a very strange combination of
the familiar and the unfamiliar. Horizontally in terms of generic specificity
it’s hard to tell where the film might sit. Is it a historical drama? A horror
movie? A comedy? Director Wheatley and writer Amy Jump certainly work with each
of these registers to construct the film but it carries no dominant generic
markers. However, if we look vertically, in terms of a historical and cinematic
continuity, A Field in England does seem to fit into a
discernible lineage of ‘trip’ cinema. More specifically it seems part of a
psychotropic mode that includes films about altered states and / or attempt to
induce to altered audience perception. This group includes film like Corman’s
The Trip (1967), Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), Jodorowsky’s El Topo(1970)and Bass’ Phase IV
(1974). We could also insert the film into the retroactive sub-genre of
‘folk-horror’ alongside the likes of Blood on Satan’s Claw(1970) Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man(1973). But again, the connection to these genres, certainly
the latter is one of mood or ambiance rather than direct reference, permutation
or citation.

In the light of this difficulty, we could use the
intersection of these axes as a mode of categorization and offer the film as an
example of ‘uncanny cinema’, insofar as it stands as a film that is both
familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. However, unless we’re prepared to use
‘uncanny’ as a generic signifier rather than an aesthetic marker (which is what
it is), we need to be a bit more specific.

Indications as regards the film’s own field, can I think be
found in its publicity and promotional material. Here’s the poster - designed by artists Luke Insect and Kenn
Goodall, who work under the moniker The Twins of Evil. As their name
(taken from a 1971 Hammer Horror film) suggests, their style is
influenced by the hysterical morbidity and residual psychedelia of the late
1960s and early 1970s genre cinema. Insect’s work in particular – largely on account of his involvement in
the rave scene – has been called neo-psychedelic. It maintains the day-glo
intensity of Nigel Waymouth but is characterized by a certain level of
negativity that is at odds with the transcendental optimism of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat

The poster for Field exemplifies this approach. It
uses the same silkscreen techniques that we might expect of Waymouth and incorporates a comparable luminosity
into its brooding image of the sun / moon. However as this is a black hole
or dark eclipse we're not provided with the the orgasmic harmony and elevation that we might
associate with the posters for UFO or Middle Earth. It's quite obviously an
appropriate symbolic extraction that can be used to encapsulate the bad trip
that is the film.

Although these features link Field to
neo-psychedelia, another way of viewing the film is suggested by the alternative trailer designed by the artist Julian House. Here we have a similarly high contrast
palette indicative of stereotypical psychedelic imagery. The trailer is shot
through with the kind of mescalinized intensity described by Aldous Huxley in
Heaven and Hell (1956). However, House adds a number of additional details.
Unlike the smooth, HD black and white that embellishes the film, what’s
emphasised in the trailer is the grain of decaying film-stock. House emphasises
the degraded materiality of celluloid which seems to enhance the paranormality
of the of the events in the filed as depicted in the film. The impression is
created of spectral emanations momentarily captured on film with distorting
results.

This combination of analogue technology, countryside
nostalgia and an underlying sense of occult unease is a hallmark of Ghost Box,
House’s record label. Whilst Ghost Box owes much to the matter and colour
scheme of psychedelia it has been placed under a very different aegis, that of
hauntology.

Hauntology is, (in)famously, a term that appears in Jacques
Derrida’s Spectres of Marx(1993) as a cultural extension of his work on
the trace. As has been extensively glossed elsewhere
the word is a play on ‘ontology’ that exploits its homophonic overlap in French
with hanter (haunt). Derrida uses it
to critique ‘metaphysical’ notions that associate ‘being’ to self-presence.
‘Being’, insofar as it can be defined – when not erased or cancelled as an
unthinkable aporia – is a state of spectrality: there is no ‘archive’ or
starting point but a proliferation of echoes and shades. As Brian Baker has described
over at (SF) 365, in around 2006 writers like Simon Reynolds used the
idea to describe the sensibility of Ghost Box and similar artists who
collectively appeared to express a “nostalgia for the future”: a nostalgia for
the future as conceived by post-war community projects and the optimism of
public information films. Such a future is seen as subject to nostalgia because
it represents a forward trajectory posited in the post-1945 period that was
ultimately “foreclosed by late capitalism”.

Although this use of the term is not without problems, I’m
inclined to adjectivally apply it to A Field in England and offer the film as an
example of hauntological cinema rather than neo-psychedelic cinema. This is
because the latter term threatens to obfuscate the specificity of the film’s
events. Despite the obvious resonance of the mushrooms and the temptation to
compare the film with Roger Corman’s The Trip – an acknowledged influence on
Wheatley – to term it neo-psychedelic veers towards pastiche. That’s to say,
it’s easy but unproductive to shorthand the film as a recapitulation of classic
drug movies that adds nothing to the form. Similarly, a persistent strain of
English psychedelia (early Pink Floyd, Tolkien revivalism, John Michell)
valorised the rural as a space of alterity away from the kind of brutalist
projects so lamented by John Barr in Derelict Britain (1969).

It’s precisely the decline and virtual disappearance of
these projects: new towns, garden cities, comprehensives and polytechnics
that’s investigated and valorised in the hauntology of Ghost Box et al. Coupled
with a fascination with the mediating productivity of redundant recording
technology the idea is that such spaces, equipment and architecture exude a
powerful psychogeographic resonance.

I think it’s very much this kind of territory that
Wheatley’s film fits into. Despite its atavism, it offers a perspective on the
occultural landscape that’s different to that which we might expect to find in
broadly comparable 1960s texts. In the film the filed itself is
narratologically foregrounded. It is not, as in Witchfinder General, a backdrop
across which acts of violence take place or a screen which, as in the
cityscapes of The Trip is seen differently under synthetic stimulation. Instead
the field is presented as a deeply affective space. It is an instrument and a
cultivated technology of mediation that exerts a powerful influence over its
receivers; an influence which, if we are to go along with the trilogy reading
of Wheatley’s work, is still active in Kill List (2011) and Sightseers
(2012).

In this sense, I’d place A Field in England not
with Blood on Satan’s Claw but with
more directly hauntological texts such as the work of Nigel Kneale, particularly Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and The Stone Tape
(1972). In each case the results are the same, it’s just the technology that’s
different. In offering this
categorization, I’m using ‘hauntological; as a critical term because in this
expanded sense (and such an expansion needs to be kept in mind in order that
its specificity for Derrida can be maintained) as is suggested by Reynolds, the flickering status of the
spectre represents a riposte to the zombification implicit in the ‘retro’ work. By extension this operates against the underlying essentialism and lamentation
active in postmodernism. It points not to the return of that which has been
seen before and that which says it again, but to that which seeks to ‘make it
new’ via the return of something we never knew existed.

About Me

Strange Dimensions: A Paranthropology Anthology

Collection of essays edited by Jack Hunter features my essay on William Burroughs, magick and recording technology. Available now.

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Annotated screenplay text with archival dossier, unpublished writings and a series of new essays. Nohzone Archive.

Framework 52: Things Fall Apart.

2 volume set of texts, documents, extracts, photographs and essays covering the life and work of Peter Whitehead. Available now from Wayne State University Press.

Selections from the Nohzone Archive.

Collection of rare photographs and previously unpublished documents covering the production of Peter Whitehead's films between 1965 and 1969. Part of the digital resource collection 'Rock n Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest'. Available now from Adam Matthew Digital.

Crash Cinema: Representation in Film

Collection of essays edited by Mark Goodall, Jill Good and Will Godfrey featuring my essay on Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962). Available now from Cambridge Scholar's Press.

Telegraph for Garlic

Collection of essays on Bram Stoker's Dracula edited by Samia Ounoughi that features my essay on Dracula and phonography. Available now from Red Rattle Books.